As communication technology is widely spread, home electronic appliances such as air conditioners and television sets are going to be connected to a home network. Network Attached Storage (NAS) for home use is also available on the market, and the NAS is also connected to the home network. When the home network is used, for example, remote control such as using an air conditioning function (service) of an air conditioner (service device) can be realized using a PC (user device).
When the user device and the service device communicate with each other in the home network, the service device needs to be in power ON state, but this causes a problem in that a standby power consumption (power consumption while the user device does not use the service device) in the home increases.
In order to solve such problem, there is a technique called WOL (Wake On LAN). In this technique, the user device transmits a packet called a magic packet to the service device, and the service device can be turned on when the service device receives the magic packet. When this technique is used, after the user device turns on the service device, the user device can receive service from the service device. Therefore, the service device can turn off almost all the constituent elements except the network interface while the service is not provided. This reduces the power consumption in the standby time.
The magic packet has a particular bit pattern related to a MAC (Media Access Control) address of the device which is to be turned on. Therefore, in order for the user device to transmit the magic packet, the user device needs to obtain the MAC address of the service device in advance and set it to the user device.
For example, when many service devices are connected to the home network, the user has to set many MAC addresses of the service devices in the user device, and it is cumbersome to do so.
A method as defined in SLP (Service Location Protocol: IETF RFC 2165) is known, in which each service device connected to a network registers service attribute information of itself to a directory agent, and a user device searches the service attribute information from the directory agent (RFC 2165 Service Location Protocol, IETF, 1997).
According to this technique, the user device does not need to obtain the MAC address from each of the service devices, and the user device can obtain the MAC addresses from only the directory agent. Accordingly, the MAC addresses of the service devices can be automatically set to the user device, which makes it less cumbersome for the user to do so.
Here, however, it is necessary for the directory agent to be kept running at all times in order to communicate with the user device and each of the service devices, and this causes a problem in that new power consumption occurs.
An object of a communication device management apparatus according to an embodiment of the present invention is to allow a user device to easily set device information of a service device connected to a network and to reduce power consumption of a directory agent.